Get “Smart” About Capturing Email Marketing Campaign Ideas | iContact

While there is no such thing as a bad idea in marketing, some ideas are clearly better than others. As a marketer you will need a constant flow of great ideas to ensure your campaigns remain engaging and deliver the kind of results you are looking for. But for many small-business marketers, capturing those great content or campaign ideas (and filtering out the not-so-good ones) is a major challenge.

If you’re anything like me, the very best ideas come to you when you are away from your desk. They come from conversations with customers or industry peers, they come from articles in the news, and sometimes they come completely from left field while I’m playing with my kids or out riding my bike.

These ideas are often fleeting, and again, if you are anything like me, if they are not captured straightaway will disappear into the quicksand of an overactive mind.

I know I am not alone in this problem. I recently polled an audience at an event I was speaking at and discovered that 50 percent of the room shared a concern about how to efficiently capture ideas.

The crazy thing is that capturing ideas is so easy that many people simply overlook the simple mechanism for doing so.

Get Smart

I’d be very surprised if you told me you that didn’t carry a smartphone around with you at all times. We use smartphones to answer calls, reply to emails, post tweets or updates to Facebook, take photos, watch videos, read books, etc.

So why not use your smartphone to capture ideas?

When an idea comes to me, I stop what I’m doing (when possible) and quickly send myself a message from my smartphone. It’s that simple.

When I get back to my office, I transfer these ideas to a whiteboard, where I am able to prioritize and edit and eventually create, when time allows. It’s that simple. As a result, I am never short of ideas and so I rarely find myself staring at a blank screen.

If you are not capturing ideas at source, you are making your life as a marketer so much more difficult and hindering your productivity. Campaign creation is easy when you have the technology and it’s probably sitting in your pocket right now).

Where do your best campaign ideas come from? Share your comments in the box below.